CyberWeb SoftWare

Hubble Space Telescope

The Richmond Family came to Washington DC in early 1993 for Alan to work for NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Archive Research Center. While there the web came to his attention and he developed some of NASA's first web-based astrophysics tools. He quit in late 1985 to establish a web consultancy and to devote more time to The WDVL. As it turned out we had a hard time making the consulting side work, but the advertising revenue from our web site kept us from total starvation. After a year or so the revenue grew to be enough so that we could stop the consultancy side and work full-time on the web site. And after a couple of very hard years we managed to pay off all our debts.

But the funny thing is that we kept hearing all these marketing folks saying you can't make money off the web. I guess they were all looking at the biggies like Yahoo! Who cares about the pioneer "mom & pop" cybersteaders? Well, one famous Internet publisher did. They offered us $n00,000 for the site, and employment, stock options, advertising commission, etc.. which we turned down after 2 months of agonising consideration. There were several reasons for this. I won't say them here and now, but I quit NASA to be my own boss - and I still am.